FastSpring

FEBRUARY 6, 2025

If you’re running a smaller digital business, you may find it challenging to hire great talent. Larger technology companies can pay more, offer more benefits, and provide a more marketable brand on a candidate’s resume. Podcast Full Interview: Audio Listen online or find it on more podcast services.

SMB 99

SMB Sales Recruiting Branding Sales Hiring 99

SaaStr

JULY 10, 2021

Which role should you hire for first? For starters, your first hire should be someone who can complement your skills, someone who is strong in areas where you’re weak, but it goes much deeper than that. Obviously, I can’t imagine a chief executive not having loss of sleep over building a management team. Mallun : Sure.

Sales Hiring 264

Sales Hiring Underperforming Technical Team Development Team Review CTO Hire 264

SaaStr

FEBRUARY 15, 2023

Marketing, design, and product teams work to optimize one end of the funnel at the cost of the other. If you have product market fit, don’t wait to implement outbound. Regardless, be furious about outbound and bring an entrepreneurial mindset to your marketing. The next hiring focus should be growth marketing.

Scale 244

Scale Sales Hiring CTO Hire Scaling 244

SaaStr

AUGUST 25, 2023

You have to see: A couple of good hires brought in Improvement on some metrics A big deal or two hanging out there, brought in and closed Things taken off your plate. More time may make them better if they’re already progressing, even if it’s just 10-15% in the first sales cycle. Hiring someone too junior. That often compounds.

Part-Time VPE 242

Part-Time VPE Sales Hiring Scale CTO Hire 242

SaaStr

SEPTEMBER 18, 2020

You can watch the full session , and if you missed the podcast with the first half of the interview, you’ll find that here. If you would like to find out more about the show and the guests presented, you can follow us on Twitter here: Jason Lemkin. We might’ve touched on this one too on the hiring and the people.

Sales Hiring 246

Sales Hiring CTO Hire Scale Investment 246

Tom Tunguz

NOVEMBER 18, 2015

Last night, SaaS Office Hours hosted Optimizely co-founder and CTO Pete Koomen. Pete was a Google Associate Product Manager for AdSense and launched Google App Engine. First, hire a management coach to work with you as the company grows. These were some of the things I learned from Pete. And you should do it right then.

CTO Coach 113

CTO Coach Sales Hiring CTO Hire Startup 113

Tom Tunguz

OCTOBER 24, 2021

A thanks to [Marsh 00:00:34] for stepping in at the beginning of the month, and a great session with our own Jason Warner and Adrian, the CTO of Zendesk. Lionetti, the CMO at Confluent, and most recently, the CTO from Zendesk, Adrian. Anything that you can find that cascades through the organization is critical.

CTO Coach 159

CTO Coach Sales Hiring Sales Recruiting CTO Hire 159

Intercom, Inc.

OCTOBER 31, 2019

Here are five quick takeaways: Balancing human-computer interaction has been the difference between technologies that break out and are very successful and technologies that are considered to be ahead of their time or just not the right product-market fit. That was actually a pretty tall order at the time.

Artificial Intelligence 169

Artificial Intelligence Scale CTO Hire Technology 169

User Pilot

JULY 27, 2023

In this article, we’ve outlined the major roles that move the needle in terms of product growth alongside their KPIs and current salary ranges. Before hiring, assess your current needs and hire as your company grows. Before the hiring process, take some time to decide on your current needs and hire as your company grows.

Sales Hiring 98

Sales Hiring SaaS Payments Sales Recruiting CTO Hire 98

SaaStr

NOVEMBER 21, 2019

To build the initial team, to build the product, to build the initial go to market, to build the first customers and to build the ARR, the starting. Pietro : This journey used to end at the legendary, mythical product/market fit. It’s known that you can probably sell those first couple of contracts.

New CTO 182

New CTO Sales Hiring B2C CTO Hire 182

SaaStr

APRIL 9, 2019

Mallun Yen : So, you were an engineer by training and then you became an engineering leader, as the CTO of Webex, and then you became a CEO. You’ve got to learn about sales, about marketing and, otherwise, you need to hire a lot of other people around you to help. Mallun Yen : So, when did you hire employee 34?

Sales Hiring 145

Sales Hiring Scale CTO Hire Marketing 145

OPEXEngine

JUNE 16, 2020

Hired CEOs: It’s the Board’s Company vs. It’s My Company to Run. You become a hired CEO primarily through one path — climbing the corporate ladder at a large tech company [5a], reaching the GM or CXO level, and then deciding to branch out. Dave started his career in technical and product marketing positions at Ingres and Versant.

Sales Hiring 59

Sales Hiring CTO Hire Venture Capital Technical Advisors 59

SaaStr

SEPTEMBER 26, 2019

So you were the first sales hire. Talk to me about the sales hires that you made back in the early days and talk to me about how it changed through the different stages. So my first sales hire was beginning of 2015. The very first few sales hire are I would say not your typical reps. Laura Bilazarian : Awesome.

Scale 150

Scale Sales Hiring Sales Recruiting Technical Advisors 150

OPEXEngine

FEBRUARY 13, 2020

To combat this and be more agile, SaaS management is morphing and restructuring functional management and multiplying the number of new C-Suite titles like Chief Customer Officer, Chief Revenue Officer, and Chief Product Officer, not to mention Chief Performance Officer and Chief Security Officer.

Part-Time CTO 69

Part-Time CTO CTO CTO Hire Management 69

Chart Mogul

MARCH 9, 2020

Joel had what he calls “an honest conversation” with Buffer’s CTO Dan. One interesting thing that Joel shared with us, was that he realized implementing these software tools would require a large investment, but he consciously made that decision: I would gladly spend $100,000 on a tool if that would allow me to avoid hiring.

Payment Solutions 113

Payment Solutions Payment Features Payments Social Media 113

OpenView Labs

JULY 2, 2020

Time and time again SaaS companies are promising customers that they will save hundreds of thousands of dollars, but their pricing strategies are only capturing a tiny fraction of that savings. Find out here. At the enterprise level, discounting SaaS contracts is expected, not optional. nlanma Tarihi of Forseti.

Pricing 135

Pricing SaaS Payments Payments SaaS 135

Andreessen Horowitz

DECEMBER 4, 2023

To improve the efficiency of spend on cost of goods sold (COGS), most growth-stage leaders can optimize seat-based spend or renegotiate consumption-based contracts in a quarter or 2. And finding inefficiencies in overhead (e.g., Ultimately, applying a framework and rigor to ROI is as critical for R&D as other areas of spend.

Underperforming Technical Team 120

Underperforming Technical Team Benchmarks CTO Hire New CTO 120

Upscope

JANUARY 5, 2020

Superhuman achieved product market fit and positioning by creating an engine Superhuman ran a brilliant detailed step by step process that helped achieve real product market fit and provide their precise positioning in the crowded email client market. Two key things greatly helped find their positioning.

Strategy 128

Strategy Marketing Sales Hiring Engineering 128

Andreessen Horowitz

NOVEMBER 28, 2023

Seema: Would love to talk about finding those initial customers who you tested with. So we didn’t have product market fit for that. How did you think about, who do I want to target for that product given where we are now. I knew that we had something here when we were in the Postmates office in San Francisco.

Merchant Services 81

Merchant Services Payment Methods Payments Payment Solutions 81

SaaStr

APRIL 4, 2019

We needed to stay relevant along the customer’s journey and we needed to find our own cloud provider that was going to allow for us to scale quickly, to have the security that we knew customers were demanding when they were searching for cloud platforms. And what challenge that presented to us was how do we do that quickly.

Cloud 173

Cloud Scale Trends Artificial Intelligence 173

Chart Mogul

JULY 1, 2020

After missing the mark on product/market fit for their first startup, the founders decided to find a new business idea and validate it with potential customers. The problem was, it was very hard to find people to talk to about your prototype and conduct your research. As people or members of the same team, we’re biased.

Interviewing 76

Interviewing B2B Marketing Underperforming Technical Team 76

OPEXEngine

NOVEMBER 11, 2020

In HubSpot’s case, we eventually hired a world-class data science team, but our scoring only improved by a few points,” notes Redbord. You’ll need someone familiar with your data—perhaps a CTO or someone responsible for business operations. Especially in the early days, keeping your scoring system simple and lean will help you: 1.

Startup 91

Startup Scale Systems Review Technical Review 91

ProfitWell

DECEMBER 6, 2019

Plus, the Product Marketing Alliance drops the Product Marketing Salary Survey. What about the ROI of spending time with your family, friends, or kids? How many CSMs should you hire? Product marketers: move west. The Product Marketing Alliance dropped the Product Marketing Salary Survey.

Scale 43

Scale CTO Hire Sales Hiring New CTO 43

ProfitWell

JANUARY 2, 2020

Because the contracts are typically much higher in these sales agreements, B2B subscriptions often require a much longer sales process before your customer will consider making a purchase. When you’re just starting out, this information can be difficult to find. Contract length. B2C contract length. B2B contract length.

B2C 52

B2C Payment Features Subscription Payments 52

Chart Mogul

MARCH 9, 2020

Joel had what he calls “an honest conversation” with Buffer’s CTO Dan. One interesting thing that Joel shared with us, was that he realized implementing these software tools would require a large investment, but he consciously made that decision: I would gladly spend $100,000 on a tool if that would allow me to avoid hiring.

Payment Solutions 52

Payment Solutions Payment Features Outsourcing Services Payments 52

Mucker Capital

APRIL 6, 2023

Or if you have products that require some configuration–think about Salesforce, Segment, things like that–someone needs to set it up. Obviously if you target enterprise customers, you usually have a very large ACV (Annual Contract Value) and the product usually is complex. If you're really starting from scratch, do the product.

Startup 52

Startup Scale CTO Hire Outsourced Development 52

Chart Mogul

JULY 1, 2020

After missing the mark on product/market fit for their first startup, the founders decided to find a new business idea and validate it with potential customers. The problem was, it was very hard to find people to talk to about your prototype and conduct your research. As people or members of the same team, we’re biased.

Interviewing 52

Interviewing B2B Marketing Underperforming Technical Team 52

SmartKarrot

MARCH 4, 2021

To handle this evolving requirement, it is important to build a competent profile to initiate progress in product development. This is where companies need another C-level executive to facilitate business growth via products. What makes a chief product officer (CPO) different from a CTO or a VP in the product department.

Part-Time CTO 16

Part-Time CTO VP of Engineering CTO CTO Hire 16

SaaStr

JULY 23, 2021

Brian Peterson, CTO @ Dialpad. Tolithia Kornweibel, Chief Revenue Officer @Gusto. Nicole Culver, Director of Product Marketing, SaaS @Bandwidth. Dave Walters, CTO, Hired. Christa Diaz, Senior Director, Customer Success, Hired. Amy Pisano, CRO, Hired. Zach Kitschke, CMO, Canva.

VP of Engineering 290

VP of Engineering New CTO CTO Hire Sales Hiring 290

SmartKarrot

FEBRUARY 16, 2022

Chris Orlob is the senior director of product marketing at Gong.io, an AI (Artificial Intelligence) platform to provide sales analytics. He is a SaaS sales & marketing enthusiast who shares his insights on the same on social media. One of the top SaaS influencers is Dharmesh Shah , co-founder, and CTO of HubSpot.

VP of Engineering 10

VP of Engineering Scale SaaS Venture Capital 10

SaaStr

MARCH 12, 2019

If you would like to find out more about the show and the guests presented, you can follow us on Twitter here: Jason Lemkin Harry Stebbings SaaStr. We find that on the one hand we want our product to be so simple and easy to use and deliver a really quick time to value. The hardest element of being CRO @ New Relic?

Scale 214

Scale Enterprise Scaling Sales Hiring 214

SaaStr

JANUARY 10, 2020

297: Bob Moore is the Founder & CEO @ Crossbeam, the startup that helps companies find overlapping prospects and customers while keeping the rest of their data private and secure. In terms of replacement, what does Bob believe will be the emerging trends in SaaS Go To Market that will replace it? * Harry Stebbings.

Sales Hiring 162

Sales Hiring Outsourcing Services Scale CTO Hire 162

SaaStr

OCTOBER 16, 2020

How does Paul approach such large product decisions today? What does really effective product marketing mean to Paul? If you would like to find out more about the show and the guests presented, you can follow us on Twitter here: Jason Lemkin. Is it product decisions? Is there hiring decisions? Paul Rosania.

CTO Coach 221

CTO Coach Sales Hiring CTO Hire Software Review 221

SaaStr

SEPTEMBER 24, 2021

Christine Spang, Co-Founder and CTO @ Nylas. Dave Walters, CTO @ Hired. Christa Diaz, Senior Director, Customer Success @ Hired. Jenn Knight, Co-Founder, CTO @ AgentSync. Brian Peterson, CTO @ Dialpad. Tolithia Kornweibel, Chief Revenue Officer @ Gusto. Hector Angulo, VP, Product @ Hired.

VP of Engineering 290

VP of Engineering Technical Cofounder CTO Coach CTO Hire 290

SaaStr

AUGUST 7, 2021

Christine Spang, Co-Founder and CTO @ Nylas. Hamshy Raveendran, Head of Product Management and Go To Market @ Samsung. Dave Walters, CTO @ Hired. Christa Diaz, Senior Director, Customer Success @ Hired. Amy Pisano, CRO @ Hired. Jenn Knight, Co-Founder, CTO @ AgentSync. Aaron Levie, CEO @ Box.

VP of Engineering 279

VP of Engineering Technical Cofounder CTO Coach CTO Hire 279

SaaStr

MARCH 31, 2024

At SaaStr Annual we had a great session with HubSpot Founder & CTO, Dharmesh Shah, and their Chief People Officer, Katie Burke, on building happier employees. So, I’m Chief Technology Officer, and years ago I was volunteered by my co-founder to work on culture.

Part-Time CTO 290

Part-Time CTO CTO Hire CTO Coach CTO 290

SaaStr

MARCH 30, 2025

Co-founders Dharmesh Shah (CTO) and Brian Halligan (Chairperson) shared at SaaStr Annual the unfiltered truth on building an SMB powerhouse, pivoting to product-led growth, and why the “M” segment is SaaS gold. The company had to retrench and restart their global efforts multiple times.

Scale 179

Scale SMB Sales Hiring Scaling 179